Matthew Wong first gained attention for his vibrant, moody paintings through social media. Since his death, in 2019, prices for his work have escalated to the multiple millions.
Wong knew what it meant to feel uprooted. He spent much of his life shuttling between continents, and even before he was born his family wrestled with displacement. When Monita was a young girl, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, her family fled mainland China for Hong Kong, and her father, formerly a rich man, found work in the marble industry. He rebounded well enough to send Monita to boarding school in Toronto.
When Matthew reached high-school age, Monita decided to return to Toronto. She worried about navigating the complexities of Hong Kong’s educational system, and she was convinced that her son would receive better medical attention in Canada. Recognizing that she and Raymond would have to shut down their business, she pitched the move as an adventure. “It’s a good time to travel,” she told her husband.
Wong was nearly six and a half feet tall, handsome, thin, with high cheekbones and eyebrows that ramped toward the bridge of his nose, intensifying his gaze. He disliked having his photo taken, except in carefully executed selfies, and even those he often deleted soon after posting them online. A photo that Monita took of him on graduation day at Michigan, in 2007, shows him in a slim-cut suit, with his back to her.
Although he never felt that he truly belonged, Wong befriended a few poets who, like him, were on the group’s margins. At one of the readings, he met a woman who worked at a gallery, and they began dating. Often, Wong and Barger sat on a bench outside Barger’s home, where they smoked, talked about art, and read their poems. Wong was in awe of the Surrealists John Ashbery and James Tate.
Perhaps inevitably, Wong developed a deep skepticism of photography, which he came to think of as “an incredibly unnatural art form.” Bothered that photos could often be “immediately grasped,” he instead pursued a loose, poetic ideal. For a student exhibition in the fall of 2011, he pressed tree branches between paper and glass: stark, spindly shapes that offered no easy interpretation.
When I arrived, Monita was at a sidewalk table, conducting business on her phone. Plans were under way for the building that will house the Matthew Wong Foundation, and she was in negotiations with the engineering firm that built the Sydney Opera House. Special care would be needed, she said, to create a repository for Wong’s work which can withstand harsh weather. “It will be like a vault,” she said.
As Wong devoted himself to painting, he wanted to work with oils, but studio space in Hong Kong was impossibly expensive. Then Monita learned that Cecile’s brother, who lived in Zhongshan—a city just across the water, in mainland China—had been painting in the studios at a cultural compound called Cuiheng Village. Rent was negotiable, even free.
After weeks of preparation, Monita dropped Matthew off to paint. When she returned that evening, she found the studio in disarray. “Paint was,” she told me. “I looked at him and said, ‘Oh, my God. What are we going to do?’ The entire floor was covered in oils. I tried to clean it up, so that he could work a second time.”
Every night, after achieving a “painting buzz,” he ate dinner and watched a movie with Monita. Then he typically read—poetry, novels, essays—or texted with artists he met online, or painted on paper. He went to bed contemplating art. He woke up in the same state.
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